Self referencing

The NYT had an interesting article about failure being a better teacher than success. The underlying research that it picks up on is the idea of what makes children resilient. Having read the books (which have some good parts as far as practical advice on how to impart resilience), I found the literature to be sometimes self referencing/circular:

For instance (I’m paraphrasing from what I’ve read):
Q. What is resilience?
A. Resilience is a characteristic where someone who fails picks themselves up and tries again and eventually succeeds. This person does not let failures overcome them.
Q. What makes these people succeed in life compared to other people?
A. They are more resilient.
Q. Why are they resilient?
A. Because they do not allow failures to overwhelm them.

Eventually, we escape this circle:
Q. Can we teach resilience?
A. Yes. Here’s how....

A similar problem lies in economics and education when defining effective teachers.
Q. Who are effective teachers?
A. An effective teacher is one who raises the achievement score of its class by one standard deviation or more.
Q. How can teachers be more effective?
A. By raising the achievement score of its classroom by one one standard deviation or more.

Again, there is an escape hatch which is the question that matters most:
Q. Can we teach teachers to be more effective?
A. Perhaps.

Why is it so easy for the madness of crowds to take over

Even if the madness may only affect a minority:

From a previous post, on the bad of social media:
"In two minutes there were 100 people, in three minutes there were 1,000 people, and by the time he got to the corner of Hollywood and Highland there were 3,000 people around me. Cars couldn't go anywhere."

Instead of continuing down Hollywood Boulevard, they turned onto Highland Avenue, Duddie said.

"Another 1,000 kids ran down the street at top speed -- right down the middle of the street with traffic coming at them. It grew out of control," Duddie said.

Police asked the crowd to disperse and a riot ensued.

Recently:

Police are on the streets of Tottenham, north London, where overnight riots saw petrol bombs thrown at officers and patrol cars and buildings set alight.

Eight injured police officers were taken in hospital, at least one of them with head injuries.
The unrest began after a protest over the fatal shooting by police of 29-year-old Mark Duggan on Thursday.

About 300 people gathered outside the police station on the High Road after demonstrators demanded "justice".
…
A friend of Mr Duggan, who gave her name as Niki, 53, said marchers had wanted "justice for the family" and "something had to be done".

She said some of them lay in the road to make their point. "They're making their presence known because people are not happy," she added.

"This guy was not violent. Yes, he was involved in things but he was not an aggressive person. He had never hurt anyone."

Vanessa Robinson said she had joined the original protest outside the police station and it had begun peacefully.

She said the situation had then turned into "absolute chaos".

In both cases it is unclear how things got out of control but it doesn’t appear to to take much. A crowd with a focus can be easily manipulated when they do not get what they want. In one case, a party (music, food, etc.) and in another peaceful protest that turned violent - all it takes is a single spark.

In some cases, it can be a good thing, for instance, the so-called Arab Spring movement. But perhaps this is just a reminder of the power of small.

Is utility unbounded from below

This assumption is usually made in game theoretic versions of contract theory. If utility is unbounded from below agents play a game repeatedly then there is some path in which behavior can be enforced so that incentive compatibility holds. I may have phrased this incorrectly - it's been a while since I've looked at game theory.

Basically, all it says is that we can enforce good behavior with sufficient threats. On the flip side, one would also think that if faced with the possibility of dying, we would make a decision to preserve our lives. In equilibrium, with perfect knowledge and perfect rationality then workplace safety would not be an issue. Of course, we don't have perfect knowledge or perfect rationality so regulation is required. But can regulation perform better than a worker's private knowledge of workplace issues?

This post is basically in response to this NYT article on workers' concerns aboard the Deepwater Horizon before it blew up:

A confidential survey of workers on the Deepwater Horizon in the weeks before the oil rig exploded showed that many of them were concerned about safety practices and feared reprisals if they reported mistakes or other problems.

In the survey, commissioned by the rig’s owner, Transocean, workers said that company plans were not carried out properly and that they “often saw unsafe behaviors on the rig.”

Some workers also voiced concerns about poor equipment reliability, “which they believed was as a result of drilling priorities taking precedence over planned maintenance,” according to the survey, one of two Transocean reports obtained by The New York Times.

Rating the future

Rich Barton believes in ratings but with the current financial crisis, it is hard to believe that ratings are the future. Personally, an up or down rating doesn't convey all that much information. I was looking for a luggage repair shop around our neighborhood and did not find much in the way of ratings in a sense that the up or down (or number of stars) really did not tell me all that much. Most of the information is in the comments. This is also true with TripAdvisor. So in the spirit of conveying some content:

I went to the Bethesda Shoe and Luggage Repair on Old Georgetown Road. There were 2 things I needed done.
1. Replace a zipper for a suit bag. Estimated cost $70. We declined to do this and the owner of the store agreed that it was not worth the price.
2. Replace a handle on a hardsided luggage bag (approx 3' x 2'). Estimated cost $38. We went ahead with this and without having really tested it fully loaded I can't say whether it was a good job or not. We'll know on our next vacation.

We're also looking for a contractor for a remodeling project and star votes really don't convey much information at all. It needs to be placed in the context of the size, scale and complexity of the project which commenters don't seem to understand when all they do is assign a star.

Saving the earth in hotel rooms

Everywhere we've gone, despite hanging up our towels (indicating that we do not need new towels), we always get new towels. So much for saving the Earth. Thus I was surprised to read the following:

A few years ago, Cialdini, a professor at Arizona State University, conducted a study in several Phoenix hotels comparing the effects of those ubiquitous hotel-bathroom placards that ask guests to reuse towels, testing four slightly different messages. The first sign had the traditional message, asking guests to “do it for the environment.” The second asked guests to “cooperate with the hotel” and “be our partner in this cause” (12 percent less effective than the first). The third stated that the majority of guests in the hotel reused towels at least once during their stay (18 percent more effective). The last message was even more specific: it said that the majority of guests “in this room” had reused their towels. It produced a 33 percent increase in response behavior over the traditional message.

It must be because the hotel staff knew they were being experimented upon. In any case, an interesting application of this was:

Now Cialdini is applying that concept to energy consumption, with promising results. Positive Energy, a company that has drawn on his work (he’s the chief scientist), has created software that assesses energy usage by neighborhood. Results are sent to consumers on behalf of their local utility, praising you with a row of smiley faces (you’ve used 58 percent less electricity than your neighbors this month!) or damning you with none (you used 39 percent more electricity than your neighbors in the past 12 months, and it cost you $741 extra). ...

Keeping up with the Joneses may be cliché, but it seems to work: in Sacramento, where Positive Energy began its pilot program with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District in 2008, people who received personalized “compared with your neighbors” data on their statements reduced their energy use by more than 2 percent over the course of a year. In energyspeak, a 2 percent reduction is huge; with the pilot sample of 35,000 homes, it’s the equivalent of taking 700 homes off the grid. And the cost to the utility is minor: for every dollar a utility spends on a solar power plant, it produces 3 to 4 kilowatt-hours; for every dollar a utility spends on the energy reports, it saves 10 times that.

Overconfidence or over optimistic?

I'm still having some trouble wrapping my head around these two concepts - how different are they? For instance, do people accept risky assignments because they are confident or optimistic?
All of the pilots knew that the Cessna Caravans, aircraft designed to carry about 10 passengers but modified for surveillance work, were ill-suited for the task at hand. El Dorado airport itself is more than 8,300 feet above sea level, where the air is so thin that the Caravan pilots could not take off with the extra weight of full fuel tanks. They typically left Bogotá with only enough gas to fly down to the Colombian military base at Larandia, where they topped up before setting off on missions that kept them airborne for four to five hours.

With precious few spots for emergency landings in the Andes, the pilots felt vulnerable flying with only one engine. “In a two-engine aircraft, you lose one and you shut it down, start troubleshooting, and have time to consider your options,” said Hooper.

But as veterans with long records of service, the pilots felt capable of safely flying the aircraft beyond what others considered its limits. “It’s called pushing your luck,” Hooper said. “We were stupid but lucky, and we knew it, but experience counts for a lot in these situations. We were comfortable doing it, at first.” ...

More and more often, the small unit was asked to fly higher and higher, and deeper and deeper into dangerous country. In the summer of 2002, after flying for more than a year, Cockes, then the unit’s lead pilot, stood up at a company all-hands meeting in Bogotá and expressed concern about this “mission creep,” warning that the single-engine Cessnas were no longer safe. He and the other pilots were willing to keep flying, he said, but wanted a commitment from the company that they would transition to twin-engine planes, which the aircraft supplier was willing to offer at no extra cost.

The company said no and the rest is history:

Those pilots, Paul Hooper and Doug Cockes, predicted that the single-engine Caravan would be unsafe for high-tempo missions over the Andes Mountains. After program managers on site in Bogotá dismissed their warnings, the pilots wrote letters in the fall of 2002 detailing their concerns to company officials, including Kent Kresa, then the chairman and CEO of Northrop Grumman. For their pains they were demoted, reprimanded, threatened with lawsuits, and, in their words, “pushed out” of the program shortly before their predictions came tragically true. They consider themselves fortunate. “The only reason those three Americans were captive on the ground for five years, and the reason why five of their colleagues are now dead, is the greed and incompetence of California Microwave and Northrop Grumman,” Hooper told me.

From Flight Risk by Mark Bowden.

Does optimisim lead to over-confidence

Or is it the other way around?

In a post on overconfidence:

What do the following high-profile disasters have in common: World War I, Vietnam, the war in Iraq, the collapse of the banking system, and underpreparedness for natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina?

According to Dominic Johnson at the University of Edinburgh and his pal James Fowler at the University of California, San Diego, the answer is that they have all been blamed on the all-too-human condition of overconfidence.

The puzzle about overconfidence is its ubiquity. Many studies have shown that most people have an exaggerated sense of their own capabilities, an illusion that they have control over uncontrollable events and are invulnerable to risk. Most people, for example, believe they are above-average drivers, a statistical impossibility. We are all overconfident in one way or another.

It's a little puzzling why over-confidence is so common. Is it more common now than say two decades ago? In the 1990s there was a claim (which is probably still being claimed today) that (young) adults were prone to depression.

A popular self help book during the time was Martin Seligman's "Learned Optimism". In his book, Seligman documents the links between depression and overall well being and how pessimism can lead to debilitating depression and consequently poor health. In his book, he shows how optimism can be learned - the implication being that (in some circumstances), by taking control of events (or feeling that you have control over events) and letting go of others one learns optimism therefore building confidence. (This is basically the gist of the book.)

This all makes some sense but in the test in Chapter 3 of his book the following item (item 45):

You win the lottery.
A. It was pure chance
B. I picked the right numbers

If you selected A as the response to the statement it actually counted against you. (For more, see the book but it has to do with how you explain events to yourself and the type of explanation can affect your confidence and how you view how much control you have over the events.)

If we all started to think that we are good because we are all trying to avoid depression by acting and thinking optimistically then this could explain why over confidence is so common. Curiously, the book seems to claim the opposite - that there are more people who are depressed because they are pessimistic.

The current trend is continuing but under the different name of "Happiness" and "Resilience" and Seligman and University of Pennsylvania seems to have become the center of happiness research. See http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/.

Is there a suggestion that self-help in particular, learning optimism, having a positive mental attitude and taking charge of our lives (or at least feeling like we are taking charge) caused the financial crisis? It's just a thought - after all where does over confidence come from?

Gas taxes

When gas was $2 a gallon, someone suggested a $1.00 tax at 10 cents per year phased in over 10 years. Didn't think that would really have an effect on behavior. In fact, in today's WaPo:

When gas hit $2, and even when it reached $3, car dealers saw little change in their monthly tallies. People grumbled, but they still bought cars and let their fantasies govern their decisions. If they wanted something that would dominate the road, they dug a little deeper and took out a loan.

When you want people to respond to incentives, the incentives have to be binding.

Aggressive drivers tend to have bumper stickers

This article in WaPo:
Three horrors await Americans who get behind the wheel of a car for a family road trip this summer: the spiraling price of gas, the usual choruses of "are-we-there-yet?" -- and the road rage of fellow drivers. Divine intervention might be needed for the first two problems, but science has discovered a solution for the third. Watch out for cars with bumper stickers.
That's the surprising conclusion of a recent study by Colorado State University social psychologist William Szlemko. Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other "territorial markers" not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express rage -- by honking, tailgating and other aggressive behavior. It does not seem to matter whether the messages on the stickers are about peace and love -- "Visualize World Peace," "My Kid Is an Honor Student" -- or angry and in your face -- "Don't Mess With Texas," "My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student."

The key to the phenomenon apparently lies in the idea of territoriality. Drivers with road rage tend to think of public streets and highways as "my street" and "my lane" -- in other words, they think they "own the road." Why would bumper stickers predict which people are likely to view public roadways as private property? Social scientists such as Szlemko say that people carry around three kinds of territorial spaces in their heads. One is personal territory -- like a home, or a bedroom. The second kind involves space that is temporarily yours -- an office cubicle or a gym locker. The third kind is public territory: park benches, walking trails -- and roads. Previous research has shown that these different territorial spaces evoke distinct emotional responses. People are willing to physically defend private territory in ways they would never do with public territory. And people personalize private territory with various kinds of markers -- in their homes, for example, they hang paintings, alter the decor and carry out renovations. "Territoriality is hard-wired into our ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago," said Paul Bell, a co-author of the study at Colorado State. "Animals are territorial because it had survival value. If you could keep others away from your hunting groups, you had more game to spear . . . it becomes part of the biology." Drivers who individualize their cars using bumper stickers, window decals and personalized license plates, the researchers hypothesized, see their cars in the same way as they see their homes and bedrooms -- as deeply personal space, or primary territory. Unlike any environment our evolutionary ancestors might have confronted, driving a car simultaneously places people in both private territory -- their cars -- and public territory -- the road. Drivers who personalize their cars with bumper stickers and other markers of private territory, the researchers argue, forget when they are on the road that they are in public territory because the immediate cues surrounding them tell them that they are in a deeply private space. "If you are in a vehicle that you identify as a primary territory, you would defend that against other people whom you perceive as being disrespectful of your space," Bell added. "What you ignore is that you are on a public roadway -- you lose sight of the fact you are in a public area and you don't own the road." Szlemko said that, in an as-yet-unpublished experiment, he conducted tests of road rage in actual traffic. He had one researcher sit in a car in a left-turn lane. When the light turned green, the researcher simply stayed still, blocking the car behind. Another researcher, meanwhile, examined whether the blocked car had bumper stickers and other markers of territoriality. The experimental question was how long it would take for the driver of the blocked car to honk in frustration. Szlemko said that drivers of cars with decals, bumper stickers and personalized license plates honked at the offending vehicle nearly two full seconds faster than drivers of cars without any territorial markers.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of cars with bumper stickers in Washington, DC. If I get honked again because the driver behind me thinks I'm too slow .... grrr ... almost makes me want to move out of the region.

I am wrong again on the effects of gas prices

The NYT "As Gas Costs Soar, Buyers Flock to Small Cars" shows once again I was wrong to assume that the increase in the price of gas has not changed behavior. How much has it changed our behavior? The graphic accompanying the article shows some pretty large percentages: 54% for the Honda Fit, 46% for the Toyota Yaris and 32% for the Ford Focus. It would be more helpful if they showed total number of car registrations as well. The hefty increases could well be because these cars started with a small base.

Anecdotally, I also saw 2 Smart cars on the road today. So, should we expect the price of small cars to rise in the near future because of increased demand?

Do sales encourage hoarding?

Well, not hoarding as when there are short supplies but this title sounded catchier. Whenever there are sales I tend to buy a lot more than I need at the time rationalizing that I will eventually get around to using whatever it is that is on sale: toilet paper, paper towels, soap, shampoo, etc. A consequence of all this is that I need to find room for all this stuff. So the question now is: Do sales (and Cotsco) cause us to want more room in our houses, or even catchier (and probably more inaccurate), do sales and Cotsco cause McMansions?

Is suicide rational?

I used to think it was but this article "The Golden Gate: A Bridge Too Deadly?" convinced me otherwise:
Gazing at the Pacific Ocean over a railing only four feet high, he found the sole remaining impediment to his death was his own willpower, which turned out to be fleeting. "I counted to 10, and I couldn't do it," Baldwin said. "And I counted to 10 again, and I vaulted over. "And my hands were the last thing to leave, and once they left, I thought: 'This is the worst decision I've ever made in my life.' " CalTrans officials point to a University of California survey's finding that nine out of 10 people prevented from jumping off the Golden Gate were still alive years later or had died of natural causes, despite the rationale that a barrier would prompt them only to "go somewhere else to end it." The study is part of a growing body of scientific literature that explodes persistent myths about suicide while reinforcing a simple principle: When it is harder to kill oneself, fewer people do so.

Is it only teenagers that take on too much risk?

In a previous post, it was assumed as though only teenagers take on too much risk. What about older adults e.g. 20 year olds or 30 year olds? Aren't we only as old as we feel? We could feel like we're teenagers till we're 40 - does this mean we would tend toward risky behavior as well?
1. Drinking and driving - is this an example of risky behavior? This behavior tends to persist well beyond teen age years.
2. Unprotected sex - again, this tends to persist beyound teen age years.
Or perhaps it's not so much about risk preferences but an overestimation of our abilities -- to drive while drunk, to overcome disease.

Or would someone like Marla Ruzicka be considered to have taken on too much risk? (Note that this entry's neutrality is disputed.)

Why do teenagers take so many risks

MR pointed to this NYT article Why do teenagers take so many risks and a comment was that perhaps it's the adults that are not taking enough risk.
1. What is the optimal amount of risk?
2. Too many with respect to what?
3. Risk taking behavior varies by age profile. Should it?

I'm partial to some comments that point to evolutionary arguments but not completely convinced.